Liverpool physicists are celebrating after a vital component of the global neutrino experiment – the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) – which they have helped construct has been delivered to CERN for testing.

A collaboration of Belgian, French and British scientists, including researchers from Imperial College London, have developed a technology to detect a new kind of elementary particle: the sterile neutrino. The new detector ...

New scientific findings suggest neutrino detectors may play an important role in ensuring better monitoring and safer storage of radioactive material in nuclear waste repository sites. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University ...

The Savoy region of France is best known for its fir-lined ski slopes and picturesque Alpine villages. Less known is the fact that, deep beneath some of these slopes, scientists are investigating one of the greatest mysteries ...

Neutrinos are abundant subatomic particles that are famous for passing through anything and everything, only very rarely interacting with matter. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second. Now, scientists ...

Physicists on the MINERvA neutrino experiments at the Department of Energy's Fermilab faced a conundrum. Their particle detector was swamping them with images. The detector lights up every time a neutrino, a tiny elementary ...

In an abandoned gold mine close to Deadwood, South Dakota, construction has started on what is arguably the world's largest science experiment. I'm part of an international team of around 1,000 scientists assembled to design ...

Neutrino

A neutrino (English pronunciation: /njuːˈtriːnoʊ/, Italian pronunciation: [neuˈtriːno]) is an electrically neutral, weakly interacting elementary subatomic particle with a half-integer spin, chirality and a disputed but small non-zero mass. It is able to pass through ordinary matter almost unaffected. The neutrino (meaning "small neutral one" in Italian) is denoted by the Greek letter ν (nu).

Neutrinos do not carry electric charge, which means that they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces that act on charged particles such as electrons and protons. Neutrinos are affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and gravity, which is relatively weak on the subatomic scale, and are therefore able to travel great distances through matter without being affected by it.

Neutrinos are created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay, or nuclear reactions such as those that take place in the Sun, in nuclear reactors, or when cosmic rays hit atoms. There are three types, or "flavors", of neutrinos: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. Each type also has a corresponding antiparticle, called an antineutrino with an opposite chirality.

Most neutrinos passing through the Earth emanate from the Sun. About 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun in the region of the Earth.

In September 2011, neutrinos apparently moving faster than light were detected (see OPERA neutrino anomaly). Since then the experiment has undergone extensive critique and efforts to replicate the results because confirming the results would change our understanding of the theory of relativity. (See Speed below)